Visual recordings of moving things are generally made up of sequences of successive images. Each such image represents a scene at a different time or range of times. This invention relates to such sequences of images such as are found, for example, in video, film and animation.
Video takes a large amount of memory, even when compressed. The result is that video is generally stored remotely from the main memory of the computer. In traditional video editing systems, this would be on hard discs or removable disc storage, which are generally fast enough to access the video at full quality and frame rate. It is foreseen that people will wish to access and edit video file content remotely, over the internet, in real time.
This invention relates to the applications of video editing (important as much video content on the web will have been edited to some extent), video streaming, and video on demand.
At present any media player editor implementing a method of transferring video data across the internet in real time suffers the technical problems that:
(1) the internet connection speed available to internet users is, from moment to moment, variable and unpredictable; and
(2) that the CPU speed available to internet users is from moment to moment variable and unpredictable.
For the application of video editing consistent image quality is very preferable, because many editing decisions are based on aspects of the image, for example, whether the image was taken in focus or out.